The Anthropocene

What does it mean, the Anthropocene? A geological fact, or just a dream? Maybe we should call it rather the Anthroobscene? O Anthropocene, what do you mean?

OK. Bad rhyming aside (I’ll work on it), you have probably read of the recent “official” announcement that the Earth has, somewhere around the 1950s, entered the era now dubbed “the Anthropocene”. And, no, it’s not because the ideal of human unity or global consciousness has finally been attained (which would be the positive connotation of the Anthropocene) but because the waste products of human activity are now found everywhere, forming a distinct and identifiable, indelible layer around the Earth — a permanent record of human activity. And unfortunately, it is of a very destructive and negative sort.

I’m of the opinion that the Anthropocene is something more than the fact that the waste products of human activity — geological, biospheric, and climactic — have enveloped the Earth, and the implications are quite frightening. I’m of the opinion that included in the meaning of “Anthropocene” is the meaning of a bubble — the complete conquest of reality by the image; more specifically, the human self-image; a near complete artificial reality. And it’s somewhat uncanny that the announcement of the Anthropocene comes only a few days after I posted something about this very thing in “The Image and the Spirit of Place“.

In other words, “the Anthropocene” includes the self-enclosure of the human in upon itself, self-referentially, tautologically — the logical end-state of “the culture of narcissism” in which what we are pleased to call “reality” becomes simply a constant echo and re-echoing of our own self-understanding and self-image; or, what is generally called “house of mirrors”. Is the Anthropocene a “house of mirrors”?

It would seem to follow — inevitably and as logical consequence — the insight of William Blake that adorns the masthead of The Chrysalis: “For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern”. And what this “man” sees through the narrow chinks of his cavern — that is, the sensate consciousness — is everywhere only a reflection and echo of himself; of his own activities and mental processes congealed into a thought-form, a gigantic egregore (or golem) that is this human self-image writ large called Anthropos.

Those of you who have read Iain McGilchrist’s fabulous book The Master and His Emissary on the divided brain or brain “bilateralism” might recognise that all this seems connected with what he wrote there about the left-brain’s hyper-activity (or usurpation) and its inhibition and censorship of the right-brain’s better sense (of which I’ll have much, much more to say in future when I’ve finished the book myself). The Anthropocene, in those terms, seems more a realised outcome of the predilections of the left-brain — the imprint and autograph of its own limited and limiting activities. And yet, implicit in the Anthropocene could also be the possibility of realising the activity of the “second attention” of the more global and holistic predilections of the right-hemisphere of the brain, as described by McGilchrist. Therein also is Gebser’s description of the “double-movement” of our times, and this double-movement (towards disintegration and fracture and towards integration and coherence) appears to have everything to do with McGilchrist’s studies of brain asymmetry, the “divided brain” and the two hemisphere’s different modes of attention. The Anthropocene, at present, seems to bear the signature of the left-brain, in McGilchrist’s terms.

What’s so exciting about McGilchrist’s book is how it grounds the error of dualistic rationality and the schizophrenic tendencies of the human in the divided brain, and therewith, also, the possibility of their unification. For it’s pretty clear that Jean Gebser’s “integral consciousness” is correlated with the unification of the brain, not just bilateralism in terms of left and right hemispheres, but also anterior and posterior bilateralism (which is more subdued in McGilchrist’s work). It seems pretty clear that William Blake’s awareness, expressed as coincidentia oppositorum or coniunctio oppositorum (coincidence or conjunction of opposites) — “the world in a grain of sand”, “eternity in the hour”, “heaven in a wild flower”, the presence of the infinite in the finite, etc — is related to the facility of his awareness to switch focus between left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere modes of attention, and that this is also what Nietzsche did when he spoke of his own ability to “switch perspectives” — foreground and background perspectives. In other words, that seems very much connected with what Castaneda also learned as the first and second attention, otherwise called “the tonal” and the “nagual”. If McGilchrist’s study holds up (and the evidence seems overwhelming that it does) what don Juan did with Castaneda was induct him into the mode of attention that is the predilection of the right-brain by temporarily inhibiting the mode of attention (the “first attention”) of the left-brain.

McGilchrist’s studies suggest that a similar kind of “shifting” is occurring in the modes of attention (there are actually four modes of attention in McGilchrist, but his book only addresses itself principally to two of them). If so, what we are presently calling “chaotic transition” or “crisis” or “ironic reversal” or even Nietzsche’s “revaluation of values” is the emphasis shifting now from the left-brain to the right-brain with their two different value orientations, resulting in an intensified inner conflict, also resulting in the value confusions addressed in The Chrysalis — the confusion of the totality (aggregation) with the whole (holism), the confusion of the assimilatory and uniformity with the integral, confusion of productivity with creativity, of the image with the real, confusion of “fact” with “truth” and therewith “the facts of the matter” with “the truth that sets free”, and so on. In fact, what I have been calling “Khayyam’s Caution” — ie, “only a hair separates the false from the true” — is completely explicable in terms of McGilchrist’s description of brain asymmetry.

It would not be surprising, then, if the Anthropocene also reflects this inner conflict as well, and reflects it precisely, and so the “Anthropos” of the Anthropocene also has the implicit potential to be the actual realisation of Blake’s “Universal Adam” of the Kabbalah or “Albion” — the realised integration of his four Zoas.

And as the German poet Hölderlin put it, reflecting equally Rumi’s poem “Green Ears“, “where the peril is greatest, there grows the saving power also”. Both may be, and very likely are, reflections of McGilchrist’s brain asymmetry and their differing modes of attention that make for everything paradox and ambiguous. The “invisible” reality (or “unknown reality” in Seth’s terms) is simply the suppression or usurpation of the right-brain’s innate mode of attention (which perceives the whole already) by the left-brain’s restrictive focus which makes it a tyrant and a despot, its authoritarianism being, apparently, fear of being overwhelmed by the perceptions of the right-brain, or what Freud himself, with typical dogmatic left-brain awareness or “single vision”, once dismissed as “the black tide of mud of the occult”.

But more of that later.

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9 responses to “The Anthropocene”

I should probably add to the above, that with the “Internet of Things” and the cyborg ideal that we are pretty much transforming the Earth into a single giant Golem, as the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, once feared and expressed in his book “God and Golem, Inc”. That’s also a book to take into consideration in relation to the others I mentioned in the article. And “The Anthropocene” can’t ignore this either.

Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or the unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness or wakefulness. Through the late twentieth century, the movement of the Left limited themselves to a materialist understanding of reality- exemplified by Marxism- demanding social justice and economic equality but not the restoration of intuition and the recognition of the hidden, qualitative dimensions of being suppressed by the mental-rational consciousness, narrowly focused on the quantifiable. Gebser

Yes, which accounts for why Slavoj Zizek got his knickers in a knot about the “Western Turn” towards Buddhism, particularly by old Marxists. His published his indignation about that in an essay entitled “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism”. But you can actually read that as the same shift from left-brain to right-brain attention that seems to be the theme of “the new integration” and related to the brain dynamics described by McGilchrist. It would make perfect sense.

But then, again, one must also be cognisant of the fact that the left-brain controls the right side of the body, while the right brain controls the left side of the body, the social and psychological implications of which McGilchrist does touch upon at some length.

And one can certainly read it as the left-brain’s objection to the right-brain’s self-assertion, or in McGilchrist’s terms, the emissary’s usurpation of the Master’s purposes. For although, in Castaneda for instance, the left-brain awareness is called “the first attention” and the right-brain awareness is called “the second attention”, the reality is the reverse. The right-brain is the home of the “first attention”, and the left-brain, which massages the perceptions of the right-brain, is the real “second attention”.

But in Castaneda’s “ordinary reality” is called “the first attention” and “extraordinary reality” is called “the second attention”, although in neurodynamic terms, it’s actually the reverse.

Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is such a wonderful and insightful book. it’s so beautifully and artfully written. I look forward to hearing your interpretations and incorporation of it into your writings on this blog.

I’m really surprised at the number of people who read The Chrysalis who have also read McGilchrist’s book! It wasn’t even on my radar until a couple of days ago (and thanks to Steve and Steve for raising it again).

Yes, I’m looking forward to blogging about it, once I’m through reading it. I’m almost tempted, even, to return to the very beginnings of The Chrysalis and rework everything in terms of McGilchrist’s description of the dynamics of brain asymmetry, and in his framework of neurobiology and neuropsychology. I really had never thought to corroborate the things I write about by correlating them with neurodynamics. But then, how could I have? I needed someone like McGilchrist to come along. And so I’m pretty elated to find these issues “grounded” or concretised (if those are the right terms) in neurobiology. So, I can well understand how everyone can be excited about McGilchrist’s book.

I’ll be away this coming week, so I won’t have an opportunity to post anything about McGilchrist’s book, although I will keep in touch with the comments. The absence will also give me some time to finish the book, too.

Mysteries never end. McGilchrist in his introduction said there are six attentive movements in the brain but he is going to address only the left-right movements. It is the interactions of the four wills, the original divine will and the three subsidiary wills, the angel positive will, the devil negative will and the human will. The angel and the devil wills are defined, while the human will is undefined and in that resides the human creativity and destructibility and in that also dwells all these human differences and different interpretations until the truth reins. These are all energetic forces in a continual process of creation and destruction in a timeless and spaceless flow no one can define but only the one who has put everything in motion. We are in a time where each person has to find his fire, his tree or his cave to experience what the prophets and the sages have tasted. Spiritual technology that surpasses the mechanical technology until everyone sees the truth glaringly. In that fashion the cosmos is designed in order to move humanity step by step toward the frightening truth.